By the hundreds of millions we show up, stand in line, turn on, and tune in to watch, mesmerized, as athletes perform. And yet this experience, so widely craved and intensely felt, we commonly dismiss as "only a game." A book that looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, "In Praise of Athletic Beauty" also strives for a language that can frame--even enhance --the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. <P> The vicarious thrill, anxiety release, competitive spirit: in place of these traditional answers to the mystery of sports' allure, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht proposes a more powerful and provocative alternative. The fascination with watching sports, he argues, is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience--in the classic, very literal sense of this concept. In exploring this idea, Gumbrecht develops a lucid reflection on the pleasures of sports spectatorship and the nature of athletic beauty. Where we might readily pronounce certain athletic moves and plays "beautiful," this book gives us the means to explore, understand, and enjoy even more acutely the aesthetic experience that our words-in-passing barely suggest. <P> With a new perspective on the appreciation of--and, indeed, a new tone of praising--sports, Gumbrecht also offers a new way of narrating the history of athletics and a fresh vocabulary for analyzing various sports. Exploring athletic beauty, this book makes us understand the widespread passion sport inspires as an untamed form of aesthetic fascination.

Written for the common reader in an approachable fashion, this delightful volume draws on Gumbrecht's favorite athletic experiences.

Gumbrecht articulates what sports enthusiasts feel about athletes and their achievements. His vast knowledge of the history and philosophy of sports, combined with his passionate intellectual perspective, make this important reading for those who question the value of athletics in our time.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's book on athletic beauty achieves an athletic beauty of its own when it heroically resists the temptation of meaning. His refusal to justify athletic endeavors by positing for them consequences beyond the exhilarating moment of performance is bracing and deeply true to the phenomena that obsess him.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's book on athletic beauty achieves an athletic beauty of its own when it heroically resists the temptation of meaning. His refusal to justify athletic endeavors by positing for themconsequences beyond the exhilarating moment of performance is bracing and deeply true to the phenomena that obsess him.

As our efforts to explain and predict are baffled, we retreat into pure pleasure. Then the question becomes: Enjoy what, how? Fortunately, a new book helps lead us back to becoming the armchair aesthetes we were all along. In Praise of Athletic Beauty, by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht...is the book, and football the central game...Gumbrecht really is a fan, and he is trying to make sense of a fan's experience. Instead of focusing on the easy cases--everybody can admire divers and gymnasts and the lacier kind of ice skaters--he takes for his subject the aesthetic of ballgames, which, he points out, began to become central to Western life as spectator sports only a century ago. His central thesis, to round it out a little crudely, is that we watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone else's ability.

How would Kant, who tried to define beauty, feel about a perfectly turned double play? He'd love it, says Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The Stanford comparative literature professor's In Praise of Athletic Beautyis a thought-provoking--and academically rigorous--defense of the grace and aesthetic worth of sports.

Professor of Literature Hans Gumbrecht is a sports fan. Not only a sports fan; Professor Gumbrecht is a fan of sports fans, so much so that he has written In Praise of Athletic Beautyto describe, and to make respectable, the hours spent watching baseball, football, tennis, and other sports. Dissatisfied with the academy's somewhat elitist dismissal of sport as just another capitalist banality, Gumbrecht wants to argue that there is more to the roar of the crowd than mere tribalism. To Gumbrecht, the current mass appeal of sports represents more than the manipulation of the masses by advertising corporates. There is something almost transcendental about sport; some aesthetic quality that united us with the Greeks, the Romans, even with the gods themselves as we admire the movement of a body, or revel in the million to one victory...The writing is clear and approachable...There is plenty to hold the attention of the reader. In Praise of Athletic Beautyis a paean to what sports fans already love: sports.

Reading In Praise of Athletic Beautyby Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is indeed a valuable experience...Gumbrecht has eye-opening ideas on the transformative power of athletics--how, for example, a sumo wrestler, the most undignified and ungraceful of athletes outside the ring, can suddenly become the embodiment of dignity and grace inside it.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrechtis AlbertGuérard Professor of Literature at StanfordUniversity.

Everyfan

1. Definitions

Praise

Beauty

Athletics

2. Discontinuities

Demigods

Gladiators

Knights

Ruffians

Sports

Customers

3. Fascinations

Bodies

Suffering

Grace

Tools

Forms

Plays

Timing

4. Gratitude

Watching

Waste